The topic today is champagne, specifically Moët & Chandon’s 2012 vintage champagnes, which have just been released and will soon be landing on the shelves at your favorite stores.

I know, normally champagne conversations happen during the holidays, when bubbles are in everyone’s crosshairs. But seeing that oversized “2012” on a Moët label comes as a relief because, had we been visiting the region in France seven years ago this month, the mood of the grape growers would have been as gray and gloomy as the weather.

Frosts hammered Champagne that April, damaging vineyards in more than a third of the region’s 319 villages. Persistent cloud cover subsequently hampered flowering for the grapes that survived, and there would barely be a drop of rain from mid-July through September. The yield of approximately 20,000 tons per hectare was the smallest since 2003, 40 percent below the 10-year average.

But, as often happens, reduced quantity greatly enhanced quality — the enduring grapes were equal parts sweet and acidic, an ideal balance — and Moët’s cellar master, Benoît Gouez, would be able to happily declare his first Grand Vintage wine since 2009. It ended a rare back-to-back dry spell for the largest — would you believe 26 million bottles produced annually, on average? — and arguably most iconic of the great Champagne producers.

Some think the 2012s will prove at least as good as the 2002s, thus far the best vintage of our young century. (Looking ahead three years, 2015 is being touted as one of the potentially greatest ever). When Gouez passed through Houston recently to promote the upcoming release, he brought both Moët’s 2002 and the highly touted 1992 to taste for comparison, and the baby in the bunch more than held its own. I’ve also been able to sample Veuve Clicquot’s 2012 and it’s a keeper, too.

For Moët, chardonnay is normally the workhorse grape for the nonrosé, but pinot noir and meunier make up nearly 60 percent of the assemblage for the 2012, which is the house’s 74th declared vintage dating to 1842. The vintner Claude Moët founded the business in 1743. He was the first Champenois to produce only sparkling wines.

Gouez said the 2012 “black grapes, particularly the meunier, were exceptionally good.” After five-plus years in Moët’s monster cellars beneath Epernay, the wine was disgorged with a dosage of 5 grams of sugar per liter, then given another half-year of aging.

He describes this Grand Vintage as being “soft, fresh and harmonious. It reveals itself slowly … it’s like the gentle transition of spring into summer.” And from the official tasting notes: “The nose hints of fresh white flowers, which develop into aromas of sweet pastry, walnuts and hazelnuts, then ripe pear, white peach and nectarine. A supple and soft-textured champagne, its initial sweetness gives way to a more structured acidity. A persistent finish reveals a hint of iodine underscored by a zesty note of pink grapefruit.”

The rosé blend, in turn, is about two-thirds red fruit with 13 percent of that still red wine. The production protocols are the same as with the “white” bubbles. It’s Moët’s 43rd vintage pink, and Gouez calls the wine “exceptional in its maturity, complexity and charisma.”

It’s important to understand how much he and his Champagne brethren enjoy making vintage wines. Why? Because it gives them creative license they can’t afford to exercise with their “NVs.” A vintage champagne, even in a difficult year, is way easier for Gouez to deliver than Moët’s workhorse Imperial, which demands an unwavering consistency of style.

Think how hard that must be to achieve, melding different, uneven vintages into a harmonious whole year after year. And he’s working with 250 distinct crus, for cripes’ sake.

“We create a new blend every three months while keeping constancy,” he said. “Brut Impérial is the most difficult wine I make.”

Yet Moët’s vintage champagne commands twice the price of the aforementioned NV — a wine Gouez was responsible for morphing into a global product, which replaced the slightly sweeter “White Star” in the U.S. a few years back. The 2012s Grand Vintages will come in at about $75 and $85 for the white and rosé, respectively, whereas the Imperial is $35-$40.

Gouez, who has been Moët’s chef de cave since 2005 — he took the reins when he was only 35 — was on a dual mission when we tasted at a’Bouzy, an appropriate venue considering the restaurant’s bubbles-centric wine program. Besides showing the 2012s, he was here to remind folks that Champagne remains the big dog in a market flooded with cheaper sparkling wines such as Italy’s Prosecco and Spain’s Cava, never mind our own domestic bubbles.

He had previously been quoted as saying, “We are lucky to be able to produce great sparkling wines on a large scale, as opposed to other regions that can produce very good sparkling wines but not on a scale similar to ours. The best champagnes are totally at the top of the sparkling wine pyramid, but some mid-range ones must continue to rise in quality and this is a collective ambition.

“The challenge for us is not to lose our identity and uniqueness and to remain at the top. We must be even more demanding with ourselves in both viticulture and production.”

To that end, he has changed Moët’s course in meaningful ways, not the least of which was dramatically lowering the sugar dosage to the current 5 grams per liter — it was 14 in the late 1990s, when he joined the team — in order to, he explained, “respect the nature of the wine while sufficiently protecting it during aging.”

He admits global warming helped make the decision a no-brainer because Champagne’s grapes ripen far more efficiently these days. That goes a long way toward explaining the near-miracle result of the 2012 vintage despite all the roadblocks the winemakers confronted en route.

As a conversationalist, Gouez is equal parts engaging, erudite, expansive and passionately emphatic when there’s an important point to be made. Back when he was a fledgling oenologist, he had held Champagne with a measure of contempt, believing its production methods had become too assembly-line industrial. Now, the region has no greater champion.

So it actually troubled him to hear about a’Bouzy’s blessedly aggressive pricing model — the Impérial sells for just $44 — suggesting it hurts Champagne’s cut-above branding image. But, staunch consumer advocate that I am (and, OK, a bit of a cheapskate, too), we had to respectfully agree to disagree on that point.

Dale Robertson retired from the Houston Chronicle sports staff in February 2019 after having spent 46-plus years as a sports writer at a major daily newspaper in Texas. He still serves as the Chronicle’s wine columnist while writing occasionally about health issues and travel destinations.